The message.

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I woke up from a candy-induced coma this morning, and found this (see image above) on my bedroom floor. It wasn't meant for anyone in particular. It was just... a message, scribbled by my daughter on a Barbie scribble board left behind before school... that almost made me walk into a door, I laughed so hard.

It kind of got me thinking about our need to communicate. As a species, I mean. Sure, we have opposable thumbs and we can craft tools with them, but we also like to give people the thumbs-up and the thumbs-down. We love to tell stories around the campfire. We hate to eat alone, because we crave companionship. Interactions. Dialogue. Communication in all of its incarnations is built into our DNA. We read papers. We read and write blogs. We buy magazines. We spend hours watching a magic box that talks to us or tells us stories. We all carry cel phones now, so that everywhere we go, we can talk to someone. Even alone in the car or on the train, we talk. We listen to the radio. We yell obscenities at really slow drivers. (Or... not. Ahem.)

We have a fundamental need to communicate, share experiences and feelings. We laugh together. We cry together. We gather to share our tales. We paint. We sketch. We make music. We design products. We customize our cars. We build models. We dress ourselves. We play our music too loud. We die our hair. We get inked. We ride loud bikes. In everything we do, we express ourselves almost non-stop. We can't help ourselves. It's who we are.

Many, many moons ago, we painted stories of great hunts on cave walls. Today, we blog. We create advertisements and beam them to millions of TV sets or plaster them on giant billboards. We speed-dial our friends. We skype our family members half a world away. We post movies on YouTube.

We scribble little notes on erasable Barbie scribble boards.

We all have something to say, and our world is in no short supply of ways to help us reach more and more people.

Is there a management or branding lesson in all of this? Sure, but not today. Today, I just wanted to share that one little message with everyone. South Carolina. Paris. Tokyo. Milan. Perth. The world. Static electricity holding little metal shavings together against a flat pink plastic board. A momentary state of mind. A rare snapshot of my daughter's experience, from her point of view. The coolest creative use of the English language I've run into all week.